


if you're leaving, baby

by ryyves



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, M/M, post-100
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:40:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23314060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: the run up to new year's, then and now, or: and you lose him all over again.
Relationships: Sammy Stevens & Lily Wright, Sammy Stevens/Jack Wright
Comments: 13
Kudos: 40





	1. you'll be gone in the morning

**Author's Note:**

> chapter titles from talk me down by stonefox

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> winter holidays, 2014, l.a.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys are out here writing sweet, wonderful jack returns fics and i go straight for jack not being himself before he leaves.

Jack comes to bed late, four forty-one a.m., where, just past the winter solstice, the black is absolute and the dozen streetlights on their block only turn the darkness yellow as animal eyes. The night watches Jack turn the office lamp off. The light which fell in a prison column through the open doorway and across the king bed, over the folded covers on Jack’s side, over Sammy’s alarm clock, goes abruptly out.

Sammy can hear Jack’s bare feet on the carpet in the hall, shuffling in an indeterminate direction. The garish red numbers on the alarm clock glitch to four forty-two, and Sammy squints as he looks at it. Beyond him the wall, the window with its curtains half-open, trees between him and the sky. The space between his nose and the wall grows smaller every day, as Jack stays up later and doesn’t think to whisper Sammy’s name when he comes to bed, his eyes reeling with thought.

Sammy’s back is curved as though he expects someone to fold his body across it, and the space behind him is tundra-vast, the comforter Jack picked out pale in the dark and heavy.

The door scrapes across the carpet and Sammy twitches without thinking. Even with his eyes on the blinking clock, he can imagine the shape of Jack standing in the doorway, his eyes adjusting to the dark, looking at Sammy with that complicated expression, fingertips still on the door handle. _Come in,_ Sammy wants to say. _It’s cold._ And he listens for the swishing of Jack’s feet as he tiptoes closer. He listens for the sound of Jack pulling his shirt over his head, of socks hitting the laundry basket. If Jack casts a shadow, he casts it away from Sammy.

The covers shift and a rush of cold air hits the small of Sammy’s back where his shirt has ridden up. He imagines Jack’s hand there, soft and warm, or soft and cold as ice-water. Instead, he feels only Jack’s spine, its sharp ridges and the swell of muscle rising to his shoulders, feels their spines slot together like playing cards shuffled by an amateur.

“Jack,” whispers Sammy, and he wishes he could whisper it softer.

“Did I wake you?” Jack whispers back, his voice blurred by the pillow and distant but warm. Almost warm. Jack shifts and the soles of his feet touch the soles of Sammy’s. With distance a breeze block in his throat, Sammy curls his toes to hold Jack closer.

“I can’t sleep if you can’t,” says Sammy.

“I can’t sleep,” says Jack.

“Try,” says Sammy. “Just lay here with me and try.”

But hours later, when Sammy stirs from a dream where he is chasing Jack on foot across a desert, he is face-to-face with Jack. In the pale dawn, the sun not yet bouncing off the windows of the house across the road, the light falls across Jack's face, highlighting its structure and softening him. His hair is growing out in little curls behind his ears. Sammy reaches out and brushes the ends of Jack’s hair, watching, with eyes half-closed, the way the light shifts as Jack breathes. Jack's mouth is open and his breath is warm on Sammy's nose.

For a second, Sammy's fingers brush Jack's jaw. He shifts closer and puts his arm around Jack’s waist. Without any change in his breathing, Jack closes a hand around Sammy’s arm and pulls his fingers to his heart.

When the alarm blares, he will lose Jack all over again, to his books and journals, web pages and newspaper clippings, to the library, to phone calls from his car, to the secrets he can’t see the sun through. He holds Jack with a space between their chests, as though his body alone could say, as he never could in the light, _Come home. I miss you. It’s dark._

* * *

The house is as empty as the stare Jack levels at Sammy across the table at breakfast, preoccupied with whatever he read the night before, whatever he dreamed about. He doesn’t tell Sammy his dreams anymore, doesn’t run his mouth over breakfast about what they could mean while Sammy stares at him until he works his way to an _aha!_ moment. He doesn’t fix Sammy’s collar from behind or bring in the newspapers and separate the sports section from the rest.

They eat the cookies from the cookie tin separately. Jack eats two before breakfast, and then, with one clamped in his teeth, he retreats to his office while Sammy flips pancakes. Sammy refills Jack’s glass of water from the filter jug once an hour. Jack startles when Sammy raps on the door, only glancing up when Sammy grasps the cup.

Jack gets up and paces down the hall, across the living room, his arms swinging, his face animated but not showing all his cards.

Sammy has long since stopped asking _What are you thinking?_ He has stopped thinking, _What are you afraid of?_ He has stopped whispering it into the crook of Jack’s neck in the dark.

How many times has Jack answered _I’m not afraid_ with his heart thudding under every patch of skin Sammy touched? Yes, Sammy has held him halfway to tears and wide-eyed and shaking with information he wouldn’t speak of. Now, he doesn’t speak much and doesn’t cry and doesn’t look at Sammy like he’s looking at Sammy.

Not long ago, or maybe too long ago to measure, Jack would stop midstride and put his hands on Sammy’s shoulders, take Sammy’s hair down and run his fingers along the skull from the neck. Now, when Jack pauses behind him, Sammy holds his breath. Jack would stand behind Sammy with a fact on his tongue Sammy had no context for, his hands in Sammy’s hair, and run his latest discovery past Sammy in a voice so full of enthusiasm it must take his whole body to contain it.

Sammy holds onto that, the Jack he used to have.

* * *

Christmas morning, Sammy wakes before Jack and turns the alarm off. In his pajamas, he tiptoes downstairs to the kitchen to start the popovers. The midmorning is still and quiet, but he can hear wind shaking the trees outside. His breath is louder than the oven preheating, than the clatter of measuring cups.

He plays carols softly from the living room CD player, because last year, Jack came downstairs humming along, singing Mariah Carey in his clear, sweet voice. And they were home, the two of them, waking up to their first Christmas together in a house with a yard and windows on all sides. Jack could sing as loudly as he wanted.

This year, he is sitting at the kitchen island, studying his hands in the light from the window and watching the timer, when Jack comes down. Jack is fully dressed, as though planning on going out, but he wears cozy socks. Sammy swivels his head to watch him cross the kitchen, pass the island and open the fridge.

“Good morning,” Sammy says.

Jack props a hand on the counter and grins the way he does when he’s ill at ease. The span of the kitchen island sits between them, and Sammy is aware of his legs crossed on the stool, the light through the windows falling across the stove between them, the space beside him where Jack isn’t. The air is warm with the smell of rising dough and cold with distance. “Let’s not make a big deal of today.”

Sammy says, “What, the holiday, the—the gift giving?”

“Sure. That, and, well, everything.”

Sammy glances down and realizes he’s spinning the ring around his finger. “It hasn’t been a big deal. It’s up to us, both of us, to decide how we want to make traditions. It’s our life, our _family,_ and just because, well, because we were so excited last year… Jack, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” Jack looks at him and looks away, chewing on his lip. Sammy stares at his lips, at his white teeth. His eyes look past Sammy.

“If there’s something you want to say, you can say it.”

“There isn’t,” says Jack, so flatly Sammy knows it’s a lie.

Sammy sighs and slides off the high stool. “Jack. You know I support you in everything, but this—”

“Then don’t say you support me.”

Sammy hears the strain, the plea, rise in his voice. “I do.”

“Oh, yeah? Then what were you going to say? This isn’t like me? Sammy, you know me better than that. This isn’t what you wanted? I’m close. I’m close. It’s almost over.”

“Come on, Jack. This obsession’s never going to be over.”

“But the search will. I’ll… I’ll know. That’s all I need, I need to know." He is a shadow, hair dark as the slope of his shoulders beneath his t-shirt, his hand flat on the counter.

It takes everything in Sammy to keep his voice level, to not snap. “How should I know what’s going to end and what’s going to go on for another six months, another year? You never let me in anymore long enough to find out.”

“It’s all almost over. It’s the next chapter of… everything. Sammy, don’t you see? It’s the next chapter of everything.” Compared to his tense, tight body, Jack’s voice is grandiose with revelation.

Sammy stares at Jack for so long Jack blurs in his vision, and then he says, so soft he’s not sure he says it at all, “Isn’t this enough?”

Jack runs his other hand through his hair and laughs. Sammy can't tell if it's nervous. “This isn’t about you or me or our life, it’s about something bigger than I’ve ever imagined. But it’s, yes, it’s tiring, it’s a lot of work and I’m… Sammy, okay, just let me talk, don’t—don’t shut me down. But I’m not really up for Christmas this year.”

“It’s Christmas,” Sammy says, and hates the pleading way his voice sounds. The space between the kitchen island and Jack is a Florida hurricane.

Jack says, “I know last year was different. Maybe you had different expectations of me.”

Last Christmas, Jack fell off the sofa back into Sammy’s arms trying to put the star on the tree. Last Christmas they discovered they’d only brought one apron and Sammy got cookie dough all over his ugliest sweater. They had gone out and bought tinsel to string up above every window. They talked about buying yard art.

Sammy knew better than to expect that first-time enthusiasm this year, knew it the first moment he looked into Jack’s eyes and saw only black holes.

Sammy uncrosses his legs and speaks haltingly. “No, I know. It was new to us. But it’s still new to me, and I wanted to share—I wanted—some time, Jack, I wanted this to share with you. This one day.” One day to have him, and to have him look back at Sammy without clouds in his eyes. One day to make him smile. “Or maybe until New Year’s.”

The oven alarm pings behind Jack.

Jack says, “And you do. Have me. I’m here.”

Jack doesn’t turn when Sammy comes up behind him, but neither does he startle when Sammy’s hands fall on his arms. Sammy slides his hands down Jack’s biceps to his forearms, and as he does, Jack shifts. Jack reaches across to hold his fingers, to hold Sammy close to his heart. Jack is warm, and Sammy steps in close.

Sammy could almost let himself forget the distance, the apathy, the way he is living with Jack’s obsession as much as with Jack himself.

The silence goes on and on, but Sammy can feel in his ribs the rising and falling of Jack’s. Sammy presses his cheek against Jack’s hair and says, “But you’re not happy.”

“How can I be, when I know there’s something bigger than anything, waiting for me?” The frustration is sharp in his voice. “You don’t understand. I have to.”

The oven beeps again. Over Jack’s shoulder, Sammy can see its prison lights, the popovers browned and bulbous.

“I love you,” says Sammy into the tangle of Jack’s hair, and kisses him there. “I love you. Today can be as quiet as you want. All that matters is that you’re here, and that I see you smile, at least once, before we go to bed.”

Jack laughs that breathy laugh reserved for when he’s pleased somewhere deep inside and squeezes Sammy’s hands, but Sammy still has to imagine his expression. “Yeah,” says Jack. “That sounds doable.”

“Doable?”

“Perfect.”

* * *

The next morning, Sammy reads at the dining room table with Jack in the other room and the television running news anchors’ staccato voices or documentary narration, considers planning Shotgun segments so he doesn’t have to glance up, helpless, at the glass doors. He can see neither Jack nor the television, but the doors hang open and he can hear Jack when he gets up to pace the room.

Jack wanted to retreat into his office, a room almost as big as the master with white walls and an industrial desk with its screens and array of equipment, but over leftover popovers, both of them reading the paper and meeting each other’s eyes in a way that was once comfortable, Sammy said, “Can you stay close today?”

He is waiting for the new year to fall like rain over Jack and clear his eyes. He is waiting for the new year to let Jack rest, to let both of them rest, to let them hold each other in the dark and know the shape of each other’s minds. There are so many things that Jack does not say, words like shadows under his tongue.

Sammy can’t let the distance spread out between them like a black carpet, can’t sit with his work and not imagine the slope of Jack’s spine on the sofa, the twitch of his hands in the air when his shadow falls across the doorway.

Abruptly, the TV goes silent. Jack pushes open the glass doors and approaches the dining room table with purpose, remote swinging at his side. Sammy looks up, pushing hair out of his eyes, and tracks Jack’s movement.

Jack pushes the newspaper aside in a furious motion and retrieves a checkered notebook, its pages dog-eared and decorated with sticky tabs. Jack flicks through it possessively, brow furrowed. Every movement is tense from fingertips to shoulders, and he keeps the notebook tilted away from Sammy.

“Did you read this?” he demands.

“No,” says Sammy, surprised and indignant. “I didn’t even know it was there.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I’m not out to get you. Jesus.”

Jack looks up from the notebook, his eyes red and wild. “It’s not—” His voice shifts and he is Jack, the Jack Sammy knows, the Jack who told Sammy, with the sun in his eyes, _We could make a home, a real home, just us, something wonderful._ The Jack who said, _Yeah, it’s Lily, but this isn’t an end; we’re just getting started._ “It’s not like that.”

“Isn’t it?” says Sammy.

“It’s not,” says Jack, enigmatic, and turns on his heels. He pulls the doors shut behind him.

* * *

“Jack, you’re not okay,” Sammy is saying. He is making the bed and Jack is pulling on jeans, both of them looking at each other while the other is looking away.

“I’m fine.” This is a conversation they have had many times. Sammy folds hospital corners with angry hands, him at the foot of the bed and Jack at the full-length mirror. Shadows of tree branches fall over his hands, tumble off the bed to race across the floor to Jack’s feet.

Beside Jack the swivel chair piled with books and sweaters; beside him the hamper, against which Jack is removing his slippers; beside him the drawers they share with its stacks of coins, photographs, vials of cologne, Sammy’s wallet left open but Jack’s nowhere to be seen.

“You know I don’t want to do anything you’re not okay with, but, Jack, you’re not all right.”

“I’m not sick,” says Jack, shirtless, combing his hair with his fingers.

Sammy glances over and meets eyes with Jack in the glass. The blankets are heavy and cold in his hands. “That’s not for me to decide. But you’re… I see you every day, and every day it’s harder to look at you, because you’re hurting.” Sammy smooths the bed, pulls down the covers on Jack’s side to invite him home.

“That’s not for you to decide? Sounds like you’ve already decided, doesn’t it?” If Jack weren’t standing between Sammy and the door, Sammy would be running.

“Goddamn it, Jack, look at me.”

Jack stops. He looks at Sammy in the mirror. His hair is tousled from the shirt, and the bags under his eyes look like black holes in his skin. He looks at Sammy like he is afraid of the looking. “What?”

Sammy breathes and it shudders. He says, “When are you coming home?”

“I am.” Jack’s voice is partly puzzled but mostly blank.

“You’re in our home but you’re not home. You’re not home, Jack. You’re mine but I’m losing you.”

Jack breaks eye contact but doesn’t turn around. Sammy follows his gaze up to the ceiling fan. “I don’t need you telling me that I’m broken. Not you, too.”

Lily’s laughter ringing in Sammy’s ears, derisive. Jack cursing her out in Sammy’s car after a particularly rough show, slamming the dashboard with a fist until Sammy reached out to catch his wrist, until his hand softened against Sammy’s. Until Sammy rested his fingers under Jack’s chin and said _You’re all right._

“I’m not,” says Sammy. “I’m just saying you’re in a bad place.”

“It’s not easy to do what has to be done. So screw that, screw… your delusions of helping me.”

“I’m not. You don’t let me help you,” Sammy snaps.

“Always wanting to get something out of it,” Jack sneers. “Wanting confirmation that I’m worth the hassle.”

Helpless against this pointed, less-uncharacteristic-every-day cruelty, Sammy says, “I don’t… You know that’s not true. You’re my fiancé. We’re in this together. I want what’s right for you.”

“You don’t know what’s right for me.”

“I want you to get help. See someone. Come home.” Sammy runs his hands through his hair and tugs until a headache blossoms. He is looking at Jack and Jack is looking at nothing in the glass. He is saying _I’m losing you, I’m losing you_ and Jack is saying _I’m everything I need to be._

He is saying _Come home,_ and Jack is saying _I’m trying._ And they don’t mean the same thing.

He goes to the window and pulls the curtains half closed. The room falls dark enough that the overhead barely lights it, though it still glitters in Jack’s hair. He puts a hand on the glass. “Please. It’s a new year. It can be a new start.”

“It is.”

Sammy stays by the window, beneath which a middle-aged woman walks a Pomeranian and cars hurtle paston the way to work. “Forget about all of this. Please, can’t you? Put it aside, put it down forever, and be mine. It doesn’t have to be like this, you don’t have to lose yourself, it can be enough.”

Sammy closes his eyes and listens for Jack, for his feet, and when he hears nothing, he turns. Jack sits on the bed, one leg tucked up and the other stretched out across the carpet. It is an invitation, and Sammy stops beside the footboard. Then he sees Jack’s hand tying his laces on the bedspread. He pulls up the other foot, props it against the footboard, and looks up at Sammy. Maybe it is the light that keeps Sammy from seeing the pupils in Jack’s dark eyes.

Jack opens his mouth, pauses, touches his tongue to his top teeth, closes his lips. He says, “I don’t know how to explain it to you in a way you’ll understand.”

The space between them stretches like the view from their old apartment with Jack’s sister, the way the sea would come in with Jack when he finished his morning runs, uncrossable and constant. The unguarded door calls Sammy.

“Can you try?” says Sammy.

“Honestly? I don’t think I can. If you were going—if I were going to make any sense to you, it’s a bridge that would have been crossed a long time ago. Admit it.” His head is still in his notebook, in words he’s just realized he hasn’t written down yet. Sammy tells himself this.

“That’s not fair. Babe, I want everything about you, I want to know everything.”

“Even this?”

“I’m trying to be here for you.”

“Sammy,” says Jack, as though he does not want to be saying Sammy’s name. As though he is talking to a Sammy in his head and not the one in front of him.

“You must be exhausted,” says Sammy, and what he means is, _I am._

Jack rises and doesn’t look at Sammy. “I’ll be home before dinner. Don’t wait for me.”

“But,” says Sammy.

The door swings shut behind Jack and the shadows left behind him fall, pooling around Sammy’s feet and reaching for him. In the silence of Jack’s absence, Sammy sinks onto the bed, his hands empty in front of him.

* * *

Sammy doesn’t know how little time he has left, but Jack shrugs off Sammy’s hand on his shoulder, the back of his hand, in his hair, as though he doesn’t notice Sammy at all, his eyes on the ceiling or the sky, Sammy’s presence as mindlessly insignificant as lint on a freshly-dried shirt. He is always turning to do something more important, to flip his laptop open or read a text notification from somewhere Sammy has never heard of or drag his notebook along the dining room table, thudding, heavy with thought.

Jack wakes in the night, clutching at the comforter, scrambling back until he hits the headboard. He wakes Sammy. They are both disoriented in the dark, rising bodies at odds with each other as Sammy tries to hold him, to take his hands, and Jack tries to push himself as far back against the headboard as he can.

“Jack,” Sammy says, over and over, his voice low. Jack blinks but doesn’t see him. The room expands from the pinpricks of light in Jack’s eyes to the shape of his body in the dark, soft and luminescent in the streetlights’ glow, overlaid by tree branches.

Jack’s wide eyes don’t see Sammy, but he calms when Sammy strokes his hand.

The Jack of a year ago would get up and take a run, but the Jack Sammy has now pulls a clean shirt on and paces the house. Sammy lays back down and puts Jack’s pillow over his head, but then he’s left with Jack’s scent.

* * *

Fingers still wet from cooking, Sammy crosses the house looking for Jack, vegetables simmering on the stove, the smell of garlic chasing his heels like the puppy they’d talked about adopting. He finds Jack spread out across the sofa, neck bent the way it bends only in sleep, the sunset orange across his skin. He is beautiful, fingers relaxed in empty air, mouth parted, chest swelling with breath.

Sammy stands in the doorway and takes him in, and slowly he becomes aware of his own smile. Dinner can wait. The whole world can wait for Jack.

Sammy wants to wake him to kiss him, to kneel on the rug and be part of everything Jack is a part of. Instead he says Jack’s name softly, to test if Jack will rouse.

Jack makes a sound like he’s deep in thought, but he doesn’t stir. So Sammy pulls the coffee table away and crouches before the sofa. His shadow falls over Jack, cutting through the sunlight.

Carefully, he lifts Jack, drapes Jack’s arms over his shoulders. He carries Jack through the house, up the stairs. He pushes the bedroom door open with his shoulder.

“Sammy,” mumbles Jack. He shifts, and his lips brush Sammy’s neck, almost like a kiss. Sammy closes his eyes until Jack’s head falls and his nose brushes along Sammy’s skin. It sends shivers through Sammy’s body.

“Shh. Just sleep.”

“Sammy?” Jack struggles in his sleep. Sammy sets him back on the bed, keeps his hands against Jack’s cheek. 

Sammy takes a blanket from the closet and drapes it over Jack. He clears the chair of its sweaters and books, pulls it close, and keeps guard. He says, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, always. I promise.”

* * *

Sammy says _I love you_ into every crevasse of the house. He leaves his _I love yous_ for Jack to find in his midnight wanderings, in his sleepless, blue-stained nights. He leaves them warm as his breath under Jack’s planner, beside his car keys, in the dip of his pillow. In whole meals refrigerated for days when Jack barely eats, in worried texts throughout the day, in wiping Jack’s coffee rings away and kissing the top of his head.

And still Jack slips away.

Still Jack with eyes vacant and dark. Still the early-evening jogs giving way to hours of blue light and fingers loud on the keyboard. Still the nightmares, still the tangled bedsheets, still Jack’s bare feet burning up in the dark.

Burning up to run.

* * *

On New Year’s Eve, Sammy runs to the liquor store for champagne, and when he returns, when he opens the living room door, Jack rises to kiss him. Jack’s mouth is hot and quick and Sammy’s opens for him, a warm sound escaping. Sammy wraps his arms around Jack’s neck, the neck of the bottle cool in its paper bag. He closes his eyes to feel every crevasse of Jack’s lips.

It feels like home, the only home he has ever known.

And it feels like nothing has changed since Sammy promised himself to Jack and Jack promised himself back.

“A little birdy told me you were hoping for something special,” says Jack, sweet and maybe a bit self-conscious. “Big day ahead of us. I’ll pour.” He slides the bottle out of Sammy’s hand and disappears into the kitchen.

The living room is tidy for the first time in months, magazines stacked in the corner of the coffee table, the houseplant in the corner freshly watered, not a trace of Jack’s research anywhere.

He should have known. Sammy should have known then.

Instead he takes the champagne glass from Jack with a smile and settles on the sofa. Jack tucks his head under Sammy’s chin and talks with his hands, liquor spilling over the rim of the glass and neither of them caring. If Jack’s eyes grow cloudy with sleep, with preoccupation, Sammy cannot see.

They leave the television livestreaming Times Square, NYC, adjusted for Pacific Standard Time, but neither of them are watching the newscasters’ drone. It is not always this easy to talk to each other these days, to be in the same room and try to remember how to reach each other, to come home. But Sammy knows this: Jack is home, Jack, Jack, and no matter what comes, it will always be Jack.

* * *

Early in the morning, the bedroom black but tinged with grey, Sammy feels the bed shift. He reaches out, seeking Jack’s warmth, and for a second Jack’s fingers stroke the back of his hand.

“Shh,” Sammy thinks he hears, but the champagne is still heavy in his body and he doesn’t fight it. And Jack has spent the full night in bed for the first time in weeks.

The bed grows light under Sammy, and he slides into the dip left by a body, warm and close. In sleep, he mumbles, “Jack.”

“I’m sorry, Sammy,” comes the voice, a whisper or a dream. It could all be a dream, the rustling of clothes in the closet, of a bag soft with clothes and papers hitting an unyielding back, the bag sliding along the hallway walls. Feet pacing back and forth through the bedroom, hesitant, pulling open dresser drawers to scrape cardboard along the bottom. The bedroom door swinging open, the pause, then the swinging shut.

In the silence that follows, Sammy pulls Jack’s pillow against his body, aware for half a second that if he fills the space, there will be no space for Jack to return to.

The front door opens, and the sound of wind shaking palm trees rushes through the house, stirs the blankets around Sammy’s shoulders. If the night air is warm, it cools by the time it reaches him.

A car stirs softly in the driveway, and Sammy blinks his eyes open once. It is cold, and, still clutching the pillow, he turns away from the door.


	2. tonight, just talk me home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> winter holidays, 2019, king falls

They leave Sammy and Ben’s cars at the station. Despite his protestation, Lily shoves Ben into the passenger seat of Emily’s car and climbs into the back after Sammy. She buckles Sammy in, his body still straining to run back to the station; she holds his hand and brushes his hair back from his eyes. Trees whip back and forth in the dark, and the station lights chase them down the drive.

“What happened to him?” says Emily, and she is not talking about Sammy.

Lily snaps, “Not now.”

Sammy stares at the headrests, where Jack stares back in the dark. “It was him,” he says, voice a monotone, as Emily speeds down the mountain, scraping unmarked shoulders. “He was right here.”

Lily leans close enough that Sammy can feel her breath. “That wasn’t him. Or if it was, I don’t want to think what that place has done to him.”

In Sammy’s periphery, Ben turns around in his seat, and his hand falls on Sammy’s knee.

Sammy’s voice doesn’t sound like his own. “Will you guys stop saying that? You can’t just write off that _he was here_ and _we heard him_ because you don’t like what he said.” His fingers ache in tight fists, even the hand holding Lily’s.

Lily laughs, hollow and bitter. “To say I didn’t like it is the understatement of the goddamn millennium.”

Jack heard Sammy, his voice sweet and for Sammy alone. Sammy struggles to breathe in the vacuum left behind by Jack.

“And now that we know he can, he’ll call again,” says Ben.

Sammy presses his free hand to his mouth and bites his knuckles, hard. Jack was almost close enough to hold, and now the spaces between Sammy’s fingers feel heavier, emptier.

He doesn’t know when he starts crying. There is cotton in his throat, cotton in his heart cavity, cotton blocking his friends’ voices from reaching his ears. The car roars louder, or perhaps everyone else has fallen silent.

“Sammy…” says Ben’s voice.

“He’s here,” Sammy manages, and closes his eyes so he won’t have to see Jack looking at him from every shadow. Behind his eyelids is the place where he fears he is forgetting Jack. He feels a hand on his cheek, but it is dark and his vision is too blurred to make it out. “I was right. Lily. Goddamn. Let me go. Let me go to him.”

_Don’t you want to be mine?_

And Sammy turned him down. Sammy took all their promises and swallowed them.

Emily veers into a neighborhood with interspersed streetlights, and the glow through Sammy’s eyelids indicates that she is skirting the center of town.

“Listen to me, Stevens,” says Lily, her voice firm but her fingers soft. “We’re going to get him back. We have, if I do say so myself, the most capable, most badass team possible – and that means you and me, too. But listen to me. What we heard in there? That wasn’t him. I think I’d know my own brother.”

Ben says, “Sammy, we’re not going to sleep until Jack’s with us.”

Sammy bites his tongue, but it doesn’t stop him shuddering.

The car comes to an abrupt halt and Emily kills the lights, except the light inside which shows Sammy huddled, Lily holding him, Ben and Emily unbuckling.

“Come on, guys, Sammy,” says Emily. “Let’s make a game plan for where we’re going to go from here.”

But when they are inside, spaced around a table with folding wings used alternately as a dining table and a workspace, all the doors locked and the blinds drawn, Sammy is listless. Ben has a notebook open, and Emily is saying _Cecil_ and pointing between the lines, saying _the Shadowmaker._ Saying _Jack._ The thing on Sammy’s chest has no form, or maybe it is this: the back of Jack’s head, walking away.

“I can’t,” Sammy says abruptly. “I’m going to take a nap. I can’t talk about this.”

But he can still hear them whispering from the other room. He can hear pens click, soles squeak across the floor, the telltale drawl of Lily’s voice. In the narrow bedroom he is to share with Ben, two twin beds with a high window between them, Sammy puts the pillow over his head, but then he only hears what he imagines they are saying, which is worse.

Over and over, Jack is saying _Baby, please,_ and in the dark, Sammy repeats the shape of the words. In Sammy’s chest, aching, like acid on the heart he has been trying to be good to, Jack is saying, _Come home._ And Sammy is holding his mouth closed by force, to not let Ben or Lily hear him.

Sammy puts his knees against his chin, touching the wall where the covers fall away, and shakes. Jack was right here. Twice, now, he has been close enough to touch, and twice wrenched away, like tearing sutures.

What if that was his last chance, his only chance, a one-time invitation? What if, in fleeing, he promised Jack away forever? And the other question: why didn’t Jack let Sammy through the first time?

Ben comes in later, when Sammy is half-asleep. The pillow has fallen from over his ear. Ben opens and shuts the door slowly, softly, tiptoes across the small room to his bed. Sammy rouses to the rustling of covers and sits up.

“Sorry,” whispers Ben, his voice reaching out in the dark. He doesn’t mention the long conversation outside the room, the number of voices chanting _Jack, Jack, Jack._ He says, “How are you holding up?”

“I’m,” says Sammy, and it is unsettling to talk about himself when Jack is somewhere laughing that laugh and pleading. “I’m not doing so great, to be honest.” He is sure Ben can hear the tears in his voice, his eyes mostly dry but his cheeks mostly damp.

Ben peels off his socks and looks at Sammy. “You’ve got us, okay? All of us. No matter what comes, no matter what… all of that means, we’re gonna be looking out for you.”

* * *

Sammy wakes to Ben’s low whisper coming through the open door. In his jeans and t-shirt from the night before, Sammy goes to the door and looks out. At the workspace, Ben hunches over three open notebooks, flipping through them, a portable recorder in his hand. His phone, propped on its side, points its flashlight over the pages in an attempt to keep from disturbing anyone.

“Good morning to you, too, Ben,” says Sammy. Ben startles and stares at Sammy with wild-animal eyes.

“You don’t think I’m gonna sleep on the job, do you?” says Ben and laughs.

“I’d be pretty surprised if you _were_ sleeping.”

The adjacent door opens and Lily emerges, sleep-rumpled, braless in a tank top, her hair sticking to her face as though she had been sweating in her sleep. As though she had woken from a nightmare. She looks between them, pulling the door closed behind her.

“You both need coffee,” she decides. “Come on, Stevens, I don’t know how to work the machine here and Benny needs time to work.”

To Ben’s credit, he doesn’t correct her.

She is trying to drag Sammy into conversation—he knows this—but it is early and a disagreement would rouse Emily. He says, “You have coffee. I’m going back to bed.”

He’s barely closed the bedroom door when he hears a knock, gentle, uncharacteristic of Lily. He pulls the tousled covers back, staring at the vacated bed. Lily knocks again.

“Come into the kitchen,” she says. “Emily can hear us in here. I know because I heard you two chatting last night.”

“We weren’t chatting,” says Sammy. “And I really don’t want to have the conversation you want to have.”

Lily pulls a face, though it’s hard to see when all the light comes from behind her. “It’s not that conversation. Also, just because Ben let us all sleep doesn’t mean we get to lounge around like teenagers on vacation.”

So Sammy pulls his jacket on and follows her.

Lily empties pre-ground coffee into the machine while Sammy leans against the counter. Her hands are curled and tensed, her body rigid. Beyond the closed door, the safe place is silent, no rustling and no breathing.

She bites a lip and stops herself, opens her mouth and stops herself. “This town. It feels like, well, like my town, now, and…”

“Really grows on you, huh?” says Sammy.

“I’ve never known anything like it. Well. Mugs.” She holds out a hand and Sammy passes her the only four mugs in the room. “It’s kind of like you, in a way, isn’t it? Creeps up on you.”

Sammy checks the milk’s expiration date, sighs, uncaps it. “Have to do groceries.”

“We have enough canned beans and soup and stale cereal to get us through a week, and it would do Ben good to have to drink his coffee black. You can’t be picky.”

“What conversation did you want to have?”

“Your favorite soup, of course. Better not be chicken noodle.”

Sammy hears his voice from a thousand miles away. “Don’t do this to me.”

Lily’s eyes go dark. She rummages around for the sugar and measures it out neatly for each person’s taste, Ben’s excess, Emily’s nearly black. Sammy watches her face in profile. After stirring, she hands Sammy his mug with its Ron Begley’s Bait-and-Tackle-Shop logo.

“Did I not know him?” she asks at last. “The Jack who left you, would I have recognized him as the Jack who left me?”

The dark rushes in.

“What do you mean?” Sammy’s voice comes out hoarse, his whole body tingling with chills. The mug shakes in his hand, and coffee sloshes onto the floor.

“I didn’t… the things he said. If they were him, if all of that was how he really felt all along. If he… oh, forget it.”

Sammy sets his mug on the counter. “Lily.”

And despite the anger, her voice breaks. “If you were both so goddamn happy to be rid of me. My brother. My brother who I was closer to than anyone in the world.”

“Drink your coffee,” Sammy says gently.

“I’m not gonna pretend I don’t know I’m the reason you left, maybe the whole reason. But I need to know. Was he just mad at me, was he just furious, or was he glad?” Lily leaves the mugs and paces the room. “Because that wasn’t my Jack. That wasn’t him. But it sounded… I mean, if it was him, he believed all the shit he said, then it’s all true. So it wasn’t Jack, because he would never, he…”

Sammy says, haltingly, “He couldn’t sleep on the drive across the country. We were both mad—we were all mad, Lily, and you know how he is. Everything comes out of his heart. But he couldn’t… he wouldn’t leave you again.”

“He tried to. Right fucking there, he tried to.”

“I know, and I…” He what? Wouldn’t turn the world upside down to have Jack, on whatever terms Jack wanted him? He wouldn’t choose Jack every time? “I wouldn’t.”

“Leave me?”

“I wouldn’t,” he repeats. “Not anymore.”

Lily drinks her coffee slowly, her eyes on fire. “Goddamn. I thought it would be easier to hear that.”

Sammy bites his tongue and looks down. His voice is rough and old, so old. “To answer your first question. Sometimes, I didn’t recognize him.”

“Oh,” says Lily, very soft.

Sammy sips his coffee, pulls a face, looks at Lily and adds more sugar. She raises an eyebrow. He says, “At the… at the end, I guess.”

“Knock, knock,” says Emily at the door.

“Door’s open. Good morning, Miss Potter,” says Lily.

The door swings open to reveal Emily and Ben. Emily’s hair is tied back in a tangled ponytail, and her pajama shirt, a few sizes too big for her and boxy, must have once been Ben’s.

“Morning, Lily. Is that coffee for me?”

She sits on the counter while Ben lingers in the doorway, glancing with wary eyes at Sammy, as though afraid that, at any moment, Sammy will bolt. Sammy looks away.

“I have to admit I’m worried,” says Emily. “We can… we can go somewhere, go here, but most people can’t.”

“I’m keeping my eye on the situation,” says Ben.

“You can’t do everything at once, Benny.”

Ben runs his hands through his hair. “I have to. The town needs the show, and Jack needs us. And Cecil and Hershel. And Tim and Mary. If we need to, we can use Lily’s podcast equipment and keep it up, keep people informed, be, I don’t know, a safe place for people to come to.”

“Speak for yourself,” intones Sammy.

“I didn’t mean you had to do it. I get it, man. Things are rough, and it’s that time of the year, so you just take it easy.”

“Things are rough,” says Lily. “That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one.”

* * *

Every morning Lily emerges disheveled, the bags under her eyes growing deeper daily. Lily spills coffee across the counter, misses the mug entirely; Lily forgets old plans and passages she alone memorized; Lily looks straight through Sammy, and straight through whatever she’s looking through him at.

Sammy wakes some nights to Lily crouching beside his mattress, shaking him. Sometimes, before he is conscious, he thinks she is Jack; sometimes he keeps thinking she is Jack when he rises and follows her out of the room.

Sometimes they sit at the workspace and whisper, but mostly they sit at the workspace together and look at the walls.

There are things Lily is not saying, things she may never say, but she is letting Sammy see her try, and that in itself is a miracle. She needs someone to share this with.

Despite the chasm of loss between them, the rope bridge they are crossing to reach each other, it feels comfortable, familiar, to talk with her. Like all the times Jack would go out for a run or to the gym, leaving Sammy and Lily to prepare dinner, not always laughing but comfortable enough.

They don’t talk about the book, about the town overrun with shadows, about Hershel’s gun firing into empty space, a monster’s voice jamming up the airwaves.

They don’t turn the lights on.

“Can you try to sleep?” he asks her.

“You know damn well that I can’t.”

“Jack was great with lullabies.”

“I’m not a kid. And you fucking knew he picked up those songs from me. He’s my little brother.”

“No,” he says, thoughtfully. “You’re not. But we could all use a little more Jack in our lives right now.”

His voice when he begins to sing is a hoarse whisper, barely holding the tune to keep from waking the others, a slow, melancholy rendition if _Cat’s in the Cradle._ His voice slowly grows, and Lily reaches for his hand, holding tight in the dark. Through the window, the cold mountain light falls over her face.

She closes her eyes and the anger goes out of her face.

He follows her into her bedroom, larger than his, where Emily sleeps on an air mattress with the blankets pulled up to her cheeks. With the blinds closed, Sammy can make out shapes, blacks and darker blacks. He sits at the foot of the double bed while Lily climbs under its covers.

“When you want to be alone, let me know,” Sammy whispers, glancing over at Emily.

“Don’t leave me.”

“Okay,” says Sammy, and counts all the times he’s left her, the doors in her face and the miles of distance, the radio silence from him and Jack after she called and called and called. “I won’t.”

Emily shifts as though she’d been awake all along, and her feet touch the floor. “Do you two need the room?”

“Yeah,” says Sammy. “If you don’t mind. Go wake Ben. Tell him… tell him not to freak out in the morning. But I think we’re going to change the sleeping arrangements.”

“Stevens is with me,” says Lily, her voice brash but perhaps a little shaky.

And when Emily is gone, even though the wall between the rooms is thin, Sammy resumes singing. He lets the dark carry his voice to all corners of the room.

He knows Lily is asleep from the rhythm of her breath, from the way her fingers grow gentle around his own. He climbs into Emily’s bed and turns so he can see her. So he will stir if she rises in the night to leave him.

* * *

And all through King Falls, darkness seeps, heavy and multitudinous. Voices hover in the air and interfere with radio and television communications. When Ben runs the radio, Sammy walks through the room and turns it off, not looking down when Ben startles.

So Ben keeps the news running on his phone, scrolls through it when they break for lunch. Sammy stares at the screen and the words mean nothing; Sammy stares and all the words turn into _Jack Wright,_ into all the words Jack said on the fifteenth.

The days are passing. They are waiting for Jack to call.

There are days he will always remember, days that filled him with so much cold they wiped away everything else. Sammy calling up and down the house for Jack on New Year’s morning, yanking open all the doors, his heart thudding in his wrists, more and more frantic. Jack’s trainers gone from beside the front door and Sammy almost tripping on the gym bag left outside; Jack’s car idling its battery dry in the driveway, doors open, Jack’s keychain swinging from the ignition.

When he had called his voice hoarse for Jack up and down the neighborhood, his hands shaking, Sammy ran inside and dialed 911.

Sammy sits on his bed long into the morning, leaves his coffee cold. He wakes shivering with no blankets on him and all of them held against his chest as if they were Jack.

Lily, in the day, avoids him like a dancer, her face a careful veneer of concentration. He can see through her, can see the way her eyes glance over anything she looks at and glaze. He pretends he doesn’t catch her eyes. There are things she wants to say and will not allow herself to. The things eating her are not the same things eating him.

At night she sings to him, and sometimes they both sleep. And outside, King Falls is trying to sing them out into the open.

In the darkness of every radio station they have ever stepped into, Jack’s voice is saying, _Come home._

Let the world sing. Their voices are louder.

* * *

But he is waiting for a call, keeps his phone face up and startles when a notification lights the screen up blue. He is waiting for a voice in the walls like from stadium loudspeakers.

* * *

Christmas comes with less than the usual fanfare. They have no tree, no gifts, no flour for cookies but more than enough sugar for coffee.

The tree lighting proceeds as scheduled to an audience of less than thirty, broadcast furtively by Channel Thirteen. Ben watches the whole segment, and by the time it ends, Sammy has perfected the art of covering his ears with a pillow half a second before Ben starts to holler.

Ben laments the loss of his menorah. Lily does a food and liquor run and returns with party crackers and news of shadows spread long under everyone’s feet, of a town in quarantine, restaurants and coffee shops shut with their chairs up in the middle of the day. The people she passed seemed just as dazed as her. Emily showers twice a day and has damp hair always.

They sit tight. They keep the television on, one person always on news duty. Sammy walks through the house and finds notebooks everywhere: on the coffee table, beside the stove, tucked between shoes on the welcome mat.

The year marches like a wounded dog toward New Year’s Day. Sammy spends longer and longer under the covers, closing his eyes when someone opens the door. Outside this room, the others are making preparations, but Sammy is still hoping it will come and go and they will only wake him mid-January.

“Sammy?” says Ben at his bedside one morning, though it might be sundown for the way the light pushes orange behind him, catches on treetops through the open blinds.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m awake. What day is it?”

“New Year’s Eve. We’re gonna put the TV in a couple hours on for the Times Square ball drop. I brought you grilled cheese,” he says, and sets the plate beside the mattress. He sits on the edge of the bed and watches him like a bird, more like a chickadee than an owl. “You didn’t come out for breakfast and I thought, well, maybe you should. Come out. Maybe skip breakfast; I can’t exactly applaud the taste of apple and cinnamon instant oatmeal after a Lily Wright grilled cheese.”

Sammy eats his grilled cheese slowly while Ben fills him in on the state of the town. He doesn’t say _How am I going to make it through this one?_

Ben says, “So you can stay in here if you want, but I expect you to come out and celebrate with us.”

“What’s there to celebrate?” Sammy sets the empty plate back on the floor, and Ben takes it.

“Us. The team. The dream team, man. And getting answers, and a new start, and putting our plan into action. And Jack.”

Hadn’t Sammy said the same thing, once? Hadn’t he believed the changing of the calendar could change the world? Could bring love home? “I don’t really feel like celebrating.”

And hadn’t someone he loved once said the same thing about the holidays, expressed the same apathy?

“Yeah, no, you definitely need to come out of this room, Sir Mopes-a-Lot.”

Ben is trying, so Sammy cracks a small grin. “Well, perhaps I could be convinced.”

“Consider yourself convinced,” says Ben triumphantly.

Evening falls. Ben pulls the curtains open to let the stars in. Their light falls across Sammy’s chest, across the open door. But it takes Emily calling, “Sammy, dinner,” and flicking on the overhead in Sammy’s room for him to pull himself out of bed.

After dinner, as Ben cranks up the TV, Sammy lingers in the kitchen to help Lily with the dishes. He washes and she dries, him mostly silent and her mostly with words on the tip of her tongue, her lips opening, her teeth clicking.

“He was right,” says Sammy, when they are halfway through. “He was… he was right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t—” Jack’s voice saying _How can you truly love?_ Jack in Sammy’s room in that apartment in Tampa whispering around Lily’s wolf-ears _I had no idea it felt like this._ Jack saying _I wouldn’t want to be loved by anyone but you, swear,_ like it was the first time. Sammy doesn’t want to say this to Lily. “All this time, I thought I knew what it meant to love anyone.”

She puts a plate down and looks at him from under furrowed brows. Her hair falls over across her face and she pushes it back with the dishrag. “Oh, no. You’re not doing this to yourself.”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve thought it.”

He hands her a dish and she holds it, dripping all over the counter.

She says, “No, I’d think not. But you love Ben, and Emily, and this town and… and me, and I have watched you try to give the whole goddamn world to Jack, so don’t tell me for a second you didn’t love him the way he needed to be loved.”

“You heard him. But I never… I never worried, with him. I never thought I wasn’t good enough.”

“If anyone was insufficient,” she says.

“No.”

“It was me. And you’re right. Jack would give himself and get nothing back, because that’s our Jack. That’s how he is. I’ve seen it. But you were never his pet project. I could see it in your eyes – both of your eyes. God, for years, the way you looked at him. You looked at him and I knew I was losing him to you. I’ve never seen anyone look at him like that.”

Jack so young and already with laughter lines deep around his warm, dark eyes.

“It was love. All love, nothing but love. And I thought—” She laughs. “I thought you were going to break his heart.”

“I worried I was,” Sammy confesses.

“He’s my little brother.”

Sammy drops the sponge and presses his hands to the sink, leaning forward until Lily passes out of his periphery. “Five years ago today was the last day I ever had with him, and I didn’t even know it.”

Lily sets the dish in the drying rack and turns away. “Tell me about it.”

It is something he keeps closer to his chest than his own heart; the mornings he has woken to dead air; the rush of relief when he stepped into his new apartment in King Falls to find a single bed, so he would never wake and wonder at the empty space where Jack should be.

He wakes now and reaches out for Lily in the dark, and then, miraculously, Lily reaches back.

“You can imagine it,” he says. “Waking up in a world without him before you know that he’s gone. Everything that happened that New Year’s Eve means something different, now, something awful, because now I know what’s coming in the morning. Thinking… thinking we could just get past this, once the calendar changed. Thinking the future was waiting if I could just hold on.”

“Come on,” says Lily, whacking him gently with the towel. “Sit out here with us. We don’t have to be alone, either of us.”

And the dance begins: into the kitchen for snacks in a big bowl, into a bedroom for a blanket or comforter. Bodies pace the house like stars caught through long exposure, and sometimes Sammy joins them. They talk, and mostly Sammy doesn’t talk back. He can feel his cheeks strain when he smiles, his eyes blurry.

Jack waiting in the door to their bedroom, Jack kissing him and turning in early for the first time in weeks, Jack with eyes bright in a way Sammy couldn’t place. There are too many things he wants to forget: the last few months, the cannisters of soup he carried to Jack’s office and carried away uneaten, Jack’s fingers soft but only because Sammy remembers cataloguing their softness.

At some point, Ben comes over and squeezes into the space beside Sammy on the loveseat. Lily rises to crack open the champagne and carries back four glasses in one trip. Emily starts a fire in the fireplace, fetches firewood from the back porch. Though Sammy sits closest to the fireplace, he starts to get colder. The fire casts all their shadows away from each other, turns their faces orange despite the flickering television blue.

Lily has risen to refill her flute and Emily’s when Sammy says, “I can’t do this.” The newscaster on TV is saying _In just a few minutes, the moment you’re all here waiting for, so get ready to kiss your loved ones in twenty-twenty,_ and the countdown appears at the bottom of the screen.

Ben’s eyes, alarmed, are on Sammy at once.

Sammy says, “I need to be alone. I can’t take this.”

He flees through the back door. Ben rises with him but backs off at Sammy’s haste. The door slams behind him, the air cold against his throat and his breathing too fast.

The small stack of firewood beside the grill reaches his knees, so he sits on it, its sharp corners digging into his calves. Light falls through the windows of this house and the neighbors’ houses onto the thin grasses, the evergreens, illuminating animal paths into the woods. Jack in the shadows, Jack in the bedroom he shares with Lily, Jack waiting in the dark void of King Falls.

And overhead the silent stars, the Seven Sisters and the Big Dipper careful not to spill what it carries, low on the horizon. Jack, too, low over the horizon, Jack a moon-glow, Jack a light spilling out from between Sammy’s fingers, or a darkness. Jack like a cold in Sammy’s chest. Soon midnight will hit and the crowd in Manhattan will dissolve in sound and chaos and Jack will not be walking through the front door with his jacket clinging to his shoulders and his arms outstretched.

Sammy tries not to cry.

The screen door clatters shut, and the rush of warm air hits Sammy’s exposed arms.

After minutes, he glances down from the stars to see Lily beside him, not touching him, her eyes fixed on the woods. Her face is half in shadow, the half closer to Sammy, but her cheeks glisten in smooth paths.

She doesn’t look at him when she says, between speech and whisper, “I miss him.”

Looking at her feels like holding a broken pot in his hand and hoping the flower doesn’t spill out. Sammy holds his breath.

“He was everything to me.” Her voice takes on a note of characteristic bravado. “You’re supposed to grow up and forge your own path, but he was my path. The biggest distance between us was a few years in college. And I thought… if I lost him, I wouldn’t know what to do. And then I lost him.” She sits down on the steps, in front of Sammy so he cannot see her face, and leans against the railing. “And I didn’t know what to do.”

“You did better than the rest of us,” says Sammy. The cold gets stronger, while the light comes from farther and farther away. He wishes he had thought to put on a jacket. He rubs his arms.

She laughs. “The rest of us?”

“You’re right, that was stupid. Me.”

“I’m not here to count our grievances, or list all the ways we didn’t cope. I think I can guess the sorts of memories this is stirring up for you, but for me, it was getting that call from LAPD as next of kin. Hungover on a friend’s futon at the very asscrack of dawn and I get a call with no caller ID and I take it because… you have to, in our line of work. They say _Is this Lily Wright?_ So I’m like _The one and only,_ because I don’t know what they’re going to say. And then they ask _Is Jack Wright your brother?_ And I’m thinking they don’t have a goddamn right to say his name like it’s—like it’s just a name, like there isn’t all of him behind it, like they’ve never met him. Like he’s not, God, like he’s not a real person to them, just another in a long line of missing persons in L-fucking-A. I never had to learn what a smile lighting up a room meant, because it was always him. You felt safe with him. You were safe to be the most honest version of you there was.”

Sammy laughs breathily while the cold dissolves in his chest like sugar in water. “That’s how he got me.”

Lily matches his laughter. “You got this dumb goofy grin every time he talked to you like it was the easiest thing in the world, falling in love.”

“Okay, I wasn’t that obvious.”

“No?” Sammy can hear the raised brow in her voice. “Maybe not on the air, but don’t forget, I lived with you. I’d come out of the shower and hear the two of you laughing in the kitchen, and I _knew_ that laugh, that relic from high school, _talking-to-his-crush-on-the-phone-with-the-door-closed_ laugh.”

“He wasn’t that open about it.”

“No. But I knew him better than anyone, and I knew all his tells.”

Sammy says, “I was waiting till I flew the coop until I dealt with coming out, and then I flew it and I still couldn’t bring myself to say those words to anyone.”

“‘I’m gay’?” She turns and pulls a leg up, resting her chin on her knee. Her dark eyes meet Sammy’s.

“Yeah. But… there was Jack, throwing love everywhere like confetti, leaving it on everything he touched.”

Lily laughs. “You didn’t even want to tell me, and I knew about Jack, about every puppy crush he ever had. I asked you once and you said _No._ Then you burned the eggs. It was a very strange morning.”

“You didn’t just ask me once,” says Sammy.

“All right, all right, but you know I was trying to figure out—”

“If I would break his heart?”

“If you’d like him back. You’re a tough nut to crack.”

Sammy cracks a mirthless grin. “Florida parents,” he says by way of explanation.

Lily nods, sighing. “Yeah. How the hell did we end up in that shithole of a state? Me and Jack.”

Sammy says, softly, as though afraid to say it, “I know why you stayed.”

He strains to hear small animals, voices calling from the neighboring houses, the moon singing. There is snow in the air.

It is silent for a long time before Lily says, “Yeah. And you’re right. And you’re still why I’m staying. I mean, there’s Jack, of course, there’s always going to be Jack, and of course I think about him like every goddamn hour, but I’m living for something on this side of the Void, too.”

“Lily,” Sammy warns.

Speaking now takes Lily monumental effort. “No, Sammy. It’s because of you, and I need you to know that. Especially when I came to this town hating you. God.” She pushes her hair back off her face, tosses her head. “You know, when I didn’t have the podcast, I panicked, I… I didn’t have anything to hold onto. And you know me, I’m probably one hundred percent made of _fight_ instinct.”

“That I have noticed.”

“And I didn’t know how to fight it.” She reaches a hand out in the dark. Sammy stares at it, illuminated by the pale winter moon, midnight passed and the new year all around them. Lily is reaching out and the distance between them wavers. He leans forward and takes her hand. He holds on like he is drowning, or maybe she is.

She says, “I didn’t know what to fight. It was like being in elementary school, when they’d give you a piece of printer paper and tell you to copy a map, except you didn’t have a map to copy. But we’re getting better, Sammy, you and me. If we’re going to devour ourselves, at least we’re, you know, reaching out and asking someone to stop us.”

“Yeah,” says Sammy.

“And sometimes that’s each other.” She squeezes his hand. “I want you to know, before I forget how to say it and clam up for all eternity: I trust you. Not just with Jack, although I do, but with me. I don’t know, it… it feels like a life again, a life we can bring Jack back into. Something permanent. A hundred times better than fucking Tampa, too, that’s for sure. A place where you’ll be happy, both of you. A little corner of the world to call our own.”


End file.
